Meet Jessie, a Speech Pathologist at Mater Hospital who has a special interest in the assessment and management of voice disorders. This Speech Pathology Week she tells us how she has been working with students to optimise patient care and student outcomes using Telehealth during COVID-19.

Leading a team of up to four students at a time from the Australian Catholic University, Jessie had been running the student voice clinic since 2018 in a face to face model.

Since COVID-19 the clinic has moved from face to face to a telehealth model of service delivery.   

"We are now doing almost all of our consultations through Telehealth, this has been a major transition for both my patients and students. There is good evidence to support the provision of voice therapy by telehealth and it appears to be effective with our patients. It has also allowed us to increase our service offering," Jessie said.  

“Although the aim was to transition to Telehealth throughout the course of 2020, COVID-19 encouraged a rapid move to this new service delivery model. We quickly updated procedures and resources to support the transition and implemented them immediately.”

Jessie explains Telehealth appointments give patients greater flexibility over their health care because patients are able to have their consultation in a quiet comfortable location convenient for them.

“They don’t need to worry about travel, parking, care for their children or taking time off work. It also allows us to offer appointments to patients who live much further afield or those who are self-isolating” Jessie said.

She also noted the team appear to be seeing fewer cancellation and no shows to appointments which makes her students more productive now easily seeing between eight to ten public patients each clinic day.

"My students were a little hesitant to move to this model of care at first.  They were worried how they were going to have a successful consultation over the phone or video, but now seem to be enjoying it and finding it quite easy,” Jessie said.

“We have found that students have continued to have positive learning outcomes with this model and we have not observed any significant differences in their performance on assessment.  “  

Jessie said COVID-19 had presented many challenges for health care professionals especially those in allied health but believes Telehealth is the future of Speech Pathology and is thankful she has such a supportive team behind her.   

"We're a very tight knit group, we get along really well. We have been able to adapt to the changing environment of COVID-19 as it evolves, and we have worked together to problem solve ways around issues," Jessie said.

To find out more about the Mater Speech Pathology services you can call 07 3163 8685 the team can also assist with fluency, voice, swallowing, speech and langauge difficulties.